Our growth is vital for society’s survival. Without personal growth, we risk tearing ourselves and our planet apart and losing everything we’ve worked so hard for.
This is a follow-up to my last essay, where I talked about stages of adult development. It’s worth recognizing that we can individually grow, and we all benefit from any of us growing as individuals. Choose growth: You benefit, the people around you benefit, and our culture benefits, too.
So, why is personal development important? And what are some fun, interesting strategies for us to make a change? Keep reading to find out!
Why personal growth is important
If we want to co-create an omni-win future, we need collaborative communication, a culture based on interdependence, and a democracy that creates win-win outcomes. How do we get there?
All of this will be easier if we have certain abilities:
Firstly, we need a capacity to live in complexity. We must let go of our need for simple answers because they don’t exist. Wicked problems do. Developing the resilience to live in complexity and face our ever-changing reality is vital.
We need to hone the ability to live with and embrace paradox. To understand the critical issues we’re facing, we need a greater capacity to interact with differences and see dignity in the people we might view as enemies.
Why? Because we are bound up with them.
We are interdependent; we’re all on the same team.
While it’s easy to focus on the flaws of others, we need to face our own shortcomings. Part of this is learning to take criticism and changing our minds when we discover evidence that contradicts our beliefs.
If we can separate our beliefs from our identities, these abilities will give us the endurance to engage in an ongoing development process as a society.
We can become self-transforming people
Another reason I think this is important comes from Robert Kegan, who I spoke about in my last essay. He points out that the older we get, the more we can develop and potentially become self-transforming people. This creates a knock-on effect, creating a capacity for humanity to become self-transforming.
Here’s a short clip from Robert Kegan and the transcript:
“What if we are living longer so that we can create more of the order of consciousness that may actually save us from the peril in which we live? What if we’re living longer in order to increase the chances that our troubled species can find non-murderous, non-catastrophic, non-annihilative, non-poisoning ways of dealing with the extraordinary dangers of our third order, tribal passions, and our fourth order prideful sovereignties of thought and state.
What if we are living longer in response to Einstein’s challenge that we’ll never solve the problems tomorrow with the same order of consciousness we are using to create the problems of today?”
This is amazing to think about. Maybe if we all develop as individuals, we can transform society and rescue ourselves from these wicked problems.
How do we develop ourselves?
We need to develop self-awareness of who we are, what’s good about us, and what our strengths are. We also need to expand our awareness of others as well.
The first thing is getting really good at being who we are. Adult development theories tell us we have to master whatever stage we’re in, as that’s the only way to progress to the next level. So, how can you level up?
You can ask yourself a few essential questions:
What do you value?
What do you believe?
What do you want?
There are a bunch of super cool tools and exercises to help you wrap your head around the answers. So, let’s go on a little tour of those.
What do you value?
To determine this, check out the Character Exercise from The Developmentalist.
In this exercise, you create a portrait of the good, which is what you consider to be good in the world. You go through questions that help you understand your identity, what you’d sacrifice your life for, and discover your virtues. Check it out!
Identify your standards of integrity
This exercise comes from The Lotus Experience, and you can see how it works here. It involves making a list of people you admire and identifying their qualities. Then, you can work towards those standards of integrity for yourself.
Living into our values
Another values exercise comes from Brené Brown. Here, you can discover what your most important values are. There are great questions to explore that push you to really think about what living in those values looks like. Download the pdf here.
What do you believe?
Another exercise comes from The Developmentalist—a worldview questionnaire. It asks a bunch of questions, and you decide what you value most. The tricky part is prioritizing what you do and don’t agree with.
Spiral dynamics offers another developmental model. There’s an excellent self-assessment where you delve into what really matters to you. After you’ve answered all the questions, you score yourself and discover your spiral dynamic theory.
Another fantastic tool is the political compass test. You can figure out your political ideology, and there’s a lot more nuance than just being Democrat or Republican. Once you’ve found out where your ideology lies, you can read more about it. Here’s the test and an explainer video.
What do you want?
Something I found helpful for understanding this category is the Self-Authoring Course by Jordan Peterson. Basically, it’s a way of writing the story of your life. He’s created past-authoring, present-authoring, and future-authoring courses.
I’ve done the future-authoring course myself, and it’s fascinating. It’s a process where you can imagine your ideal future step by step and the future you’d like to avoid. You get to set goals and pick one thing to change or improve at a time.
Jordan has a great piece of advice: Don’t compare yourself to other people as they are today; compare yourself to who you were yesterday.
Processing the past
Sometimes we run into things that hold us back, like harm or trauma. We might need to do some healing. Getting stuck in particular ways of thinking is all too easy, and we might need to do some shadow work to process what we’ve been through. What are those monsters in the back of our minds undermining our growth?
In the Self-Authoring Suite, the past-authoring work has an interesting exercise: You go and find the stuff from the past that’s really holding you back. Then you write it down. Do you have something that keeps making you feel sad, angry, or resentful?
Write it down in as much detail as possible. Describe exactly what happened, what you did, and what other people did. What did it smell like? What did it look like? Getting it out of your head and onto paper can be hugely therapeutic.
Therapy itself is a great idea. It’s so helpful to talk to someone about the things that are troubling you. I would also recommend going through a 12-step program if it’s useful for you. There are so many different types, from drugs to sex addiction. It’s a wonderful process to assess what went on in your past and to clear out the things haunting your mind.
Personally, men’s work has been really valuable for me. The New Warrior Training Adventure by the Mankind Project is a massively transformational process. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a slingshot into personal growth.
Become an expert in you
Once you’ve done your self-assessment and discovered your values, you can live accordingly. When you know what you want to see in the world, you can set goals and determine what it’ll take to get there.
You need to become an expert at being you. Go deep into yourself and see what is and isn’t working. That’s important because all of us are inadequate, and no one has their shit figured out yet. When you’re being your most authentic self, notice where you keep stumbling and what’s not making sense in your world.
If you have certain thoughts or beliefs, find the evidence to back them up. Be humble in that process. Start opening to the possibility that you might not have all the answers: None of us do. Honestly, this is a crazy, mysterious world. Anyone who thinks they’ve cracked the code probably hasn’t.
There’s always room for growth, so take responsibility for it. If you think you have it all figured out but you’re still interested in growth, ask for feedback from someone you respect:
Can you see any room for growth in my life?
Is there anything I’m missing?
Do you have any advice for me in becoming a better or more inclusive person?
They will probably have an insightful answer for you.
So, that’s our personal work, but we can go further. Next week, we’ll discuss the importance of being aware of everything else that’s going on in the world. Becoming open to different perspectives is necessary work, and I’ll show you how you can do it.
Want more? Check out these resources:
Natali Morad’s series on How to be an Adult:
Prefer to watch your content? Here’s a video on the topic of this essay:
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